Day 53

Time to break that silly 20 mile mark. Did a 21 mile day easily. Sucky part is after I get to the shelter I realized I left my hot weather shirt hanging from the last shelter. I tried contacting some of the sobos behind me but I don't have much hope of seeing it.

Day 52

I wanted to make up for yesterdays short day by doing a 20+. That didn't happen but only cause there was nowhere to camp after the shelter 19 miles away. It kinda worked out anyway since I got to do a morning view from a firetower then do an evening view from another one 18 miles away.

Day 51

Got a good start out of manchester. The owner of the hostel was nice enough to drop me off at the post office to let me mail my winter gear home, then come pick me up and drop me off at the trail later. Usually that costs money but since he was driving by the po on his way to drop off the early hikers he didn't count that as my free ride out, like I said very cool. Even with my summer gear I just couldn't get moving and ended up only doing 10 miles. I've noticed that trips into and out of towns tend to be short days no matter what. The only exception was Rangely where I only stopped for a resupply.

Day 50

I have a nice easy 15 mile day into Manchester where I will be getting my summer bag and bug repellant pants. As well as sending home the rest of my winter gear. In manchester I stayed a the Green Mountain house hostel where I got free pint of ice cream with my stay.

Day 49

Inspired by the kids yesterday, and by calling in a reservation to stay at a hostel in Manchester in 2 days I decided to do a 19 mile day. Not much else exciting happened so I'll talk about how hiking is now that I left NH and Maine. Outside of Hanover I came across a hill according to the terrain profile it was about 800 ft. of climbing. So I get to the hill go up along an nice, easy, gentle graded, switch backed slope for about 400 ft. and a mile. Then I hit what looks like the steep part. I can see the top and the trail starts going straight up to the top. Now this is what I'm used to. So I take a pee, synch my straps down, have a drink of water and start the long hard trek up the mountain. About 40 yards later the damn thing switchbacks. Welcome to the south.

Day 48

It rained. Rained like it hasn't since the 100 mile wilderness. I had actually had good weather the last few days. Fun part was there was a section of the trail that had been rerouted due to a bridge being destroyed by hurricane irene last year. With all the rain the little brook was definitely not fordable. Luckily someone had made a bridge by lashing some fallen logs together. They even added some hand rails for good measure. So I didn't have to take the reroute. Which was a good thing because I would have missed the 500 mile sign. I ended up staying the night at the nicest shelter I've seen yet. It was an old cabin and whoever is in charge of it still keeps it like an active house. There is a nice mown lawn, planters with flowers and some precut wood. That night a family of 5 walks into the shelter around 6 pm, still plenty of hiking time left and cook dinner before hiking on. They had done 19 miles already and were planning on doing 5 more. The remarkable thing is the kids were 8, 11, and 13. There is no way I would have or could have hiked this trail at that age. They were doing sections but had already hiked all the way from Tennessee.

Day 47

Off to town. I had a short half mile hike to get to Killington. So after sticking around the Lodge until 9 I headed over to the Killington Post Office only to find out that I didn't have a package there after all. Very much not happy about that and I'm going to be calling Black Diamond up via phone to sort that out. I then did the 4 miles on the trail to the junction to Rutland which was a much bigger town and managed to get a hitch with another hiker named Shepard. I had run into Shepard before up in Hanover when he dropped Stinky Jesus off. Shepard is having a very interesting hike he's hitched like 60 times to get off trail and do some Contra style dancing. Since he's hit NJ where he's from he picked up his truck and is now doing section hikes. He was nice enough to drive me down to the local outfitter where I picked up a new pair of Leki brand hiking poles as well as some gators. I've done a few other gear changes which I will go over once I hit Manchester Center where dad is supposed to hopefully be sending me my summer sleeping bag and pants. I then watched a terribly amazing movie, Pacific Rim, which Shepard was supposed to join me for but he was in the middle of his work for stay when it started. I then did a short 2 mile hike to the next shelter.

Day 46

Another easy day today. The weather was nice and I had a fairly easy hike to killington. My plan was to hike to the town after Killington and stay at a cheap hostel run by a Jewish cult(very nice people though and great to the hikers) then ride the bus back to killington. But, as I reached the road to Killington there was a lodge on a crystal clear pond with a huge lawn. So I stop to take a break and soak in the sun a couple NoBos show up and say they are going to try and stay at the Mountain Meadow Lodge which sometimes let hikers do a work for stay. We ended up getting the work for stay and after doing 2 hours of work we played volleyball with the staff for another 2 hours. Then we got to eat all the leftover food from a wedding they had hosted over the weekend and soak in a hot tub for a bit.

Day 45

So I had two days to get to Killington after the short day yesterday. There were no fun fields full of berries today but I did hit a farm which was selling fresh made mixed berry pie. It was only a 6" pie but I total devoured it, so delicious. I stayed at a cabin on top of a mountain which had some incredible views. The cabin owners leave it open for hikers and have built a lookout platform on the roof. I actually had a clear day and could see the sunset and rise the next day from up there. Not much more happened today so I'll tell a story to freak dad out which I found amusing. The other day when I was having blueberry feast I had my first tick crawl on me. The amusing part was I was less then 1 mile from Lyme, NH. The epicenter of sorts for the Lyme outbreak. It was just a dog tick not a deer tick though so even if I hadn't felt it as soon as it started crawling on me I wouldn't have gotten Lyme from it.

Day 44

Had to either do a 25+ day today and a 20ish day tomorrow to make it to Killington before the post office closed on Saturday. Since in theory my replacement hiking poles would be there, even though I've not received a response to my email saying to send them there. Or I had to do three shorter days and get to Killington on Monday. I'll let you guess what I did. I did get up early and try to do the 25 mile day but it was by far the hottest day yet. They said the temps were in the upper 90's and low 100's counting in humidity. So at 2 when I roll up to a nice shelter with a water source that falls off a 3 ft rock ledge and forms a perfect shower I called it a day. I sat under that shower for a good 20 minutes until I started freezing then setup my tent and took a 2 hour nap. On my hike there I ran through a field with raspberries as far as the eye could see. I pigged out more on raspberries, which I never really liked before but am now of a different opinion, then I did on the blueberries the other day. I think it was cause they were cool, moist, and vine ripened which made the difference in me liking them.

Day 43

Spaceman's house was beautiful and I slept the entire night. Which i almost never do in the woods. He was heading out for a 2 day bike ride so I didn't get to spend much time catching up with him. I took the bus to the next town to the outfitter to get new shoes since mine were falling apart. When I got back I decided to move on instead of staying in town and taking another zero. While I was hiking a storm blew in and a lightning bolt struck a tree about a half mile from me. The tree exploded and there were tree shards all over the trail.

Day 42

Headed into Hanover one of the best trail towns in the whole at. A few years back they were voted the least friendly trail town and have been trying really hard to fix that rep. From what I saw they succeeded. Lots of places to stay, free bus service to the next town where an outfitter is, free food, a brochure explaining the town services,and everyone was very nice. This seems to be paying off for them cause almost every hiker I talked to planned a zero in Hanover. Which is going to have them spending some $. I was meeting up with spaceman again. He had completed his section hike and was going to host me for the night. While I was wandering around town I ran into another pair of sobos that I had been following, Smiles and Dave the Pirate. I had wanted to catch Dave for a while, in Maine he had written "arrgh walk the plank" on a piece of birch and posted it on a bog bridge. Later in the day the sobos from lincoln also showed up so there were more sobos than I had seen at once since Monson.
On a side note Hanover had Man of Steel in it's movie theater so I finally got to see it.

Day 41

Last night as we were about to goto bed a bear ran though camp. I was all the way in the back of the shelter but it ran right between the two guys that were tenting. We decided to actually hang our food properly from the tree instead of the shelter after that.
Leg was feeling good again so I pushed on. On the way down the mountain I ran into a huge blueberry patch right at lunch time. So I made some peanut butter and blueberry tortilla sandwiches. I then proceeded to spend the next 2 hours stuffing myself with blueberries. Same deal as yesterday the final climb up to the shelter hurt the leg.

Day 40

Leg felt better in the morning so I decided to continue on rather than take another zero. Same deal a yesterday I was fine for the morning but at the end of the day my leg was hurting. On the bright side I got to eat my first blueberries. I ended up staying at the hexacube shelter on cube mountain and it had a pentagon shaped privy. Silly Dartmouth outdoor club. They have themes for all the camp sites they maintain.

Day 39

While I was debating to take another day off or just do a few neros until the leg felt better, the guy from the hostel in the next town south showed up and dropped off some nobos pack and offered to take mine and let me slack the 10 miles. My leg was feeling better, still not healed but I could go up and down stairs with no problems. The 10 miles was over my last white mountain and the one the nobos complained about the most. So I took the offer and continued south. I had no issues going up the mountain the nobos greatly exaggerated the difficulty. There was no view from the peak but I was treated to a view from the south peak. The way down was a long gentle slope which eventually proved too much for my newly healed leg. By the time I reached the hostel my leg was hurting again.